Perhaps there is no greater test of heroic courage than
a voluntary encounter with great perils alone, where an escape from those perils has been opened of which others have availed them- selves. Such heroism has been recorded this week in the case of a Norwegian captain, Captain Adder Hansen, who on the 6th of October left Gefle with a cargo of iron and deals for England, and whose barque encountered, on the 19th October, so fear- ful a gale that all the pumps were disabled, the ship's side injured, and a great deal of the deck - load washed away. On the 20th of October a smack came in sight, and Captain Hansen's crew, not believing the vessel could live, left him with his barque "rolling most fearfully." The captain remained alone, in the hope of getting his barque into Grimsby, in which finally he succeeded. Alone he managed to set the foresail and mainsail and to light the side-lights and the binnacle-light, and then steered towards the west. He was so fatigued that he several times fell down from sheer weariness, and during the night he had several squalls. The cabin was full of water, which did much damage as it rolled with the rolling of the vessel, and when he got the barque into the Humber, Captain Hansen's strength was all spent. That seems to us, in its way, a greater feat, because a lonelier feat, than many a pilot-boat rescue in which the imme- diate peril is far more threatening. The courage of a group of associates is always much greater than the sum of the courage which each individual in the group would separately exhibit. Society is a bank which pays a very fair bonus on all individual investments of feeling in the common stock.
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